


e li ho amati

by thermodynamicActivity (chlorinetrifluoride)



Series: The Collegestuck 'Verse [36]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Hallucinations, Humanstuck, Mental Health Issues, Other, Psychosis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-14
Updated: 2016-07-14
Packaged: 2018-07-23 22:00:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7481523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chlorinetrifluoride/pseuds/thermodynamicActivity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You are Mituna Captor, you hear voices as per usual, but not all of them are bad. Not even most of them are bad. Your roommate slash best friend with benefits begs to differ. She's a student nurse, and you're experiencing psychotic symptoms. This is very blatantly Not A Good Thing in her eyes. But you don’t like the feeling of being overmedicated, or of your mind feeling silent. </p><p>So this might be the first real argument you two have had in years.</p>
            </blockquote>





	e li ho amati

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, this is the first collegestuck fic I've posted in a bit. Real life and final exams and whatnot got in the way of my producing much of anything for this AU.  
> Like a lot of the fic I've written from this 'verse, some of this is based in reality, taken from back-and-forth arguments I've had with myself and others.

_Poi, sotto i miei occhi_  
_hanno consumato tutti i loro abbracci_  
_in una profumata nuvola di vapore_

 _Li ho visti volare, così._  
_Li ho visti andare via_  
_senza una parola,_  
_senza un gesto._

_E li ho amati._

\- Mono, [Black Rain](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rslJZ8kLV2A)

(translation at the end of the fic)

* * *

 

**_December 2010 - Mituna Captor_ **

You wish more someone besides Porrim were around the apartment regularly right now. Like Kurloz, for instance. He could help you puzzle through some shit, all Kurloz-style. Call you a righteous motherfucker and help you figure out what's what.

However, he’s locked in a custody battle with his uncle over Gamzee, which means both he and Latula are MIA, trying to get Gamzee free from that house. Gamzee’ll be 18 in a month, anyway. But nevertheless. Kurloz wants all his bases covered.

Though you love Porrim as much as Latula, as much as life, like it or not, she is a student nurse. As Kurloz would put it, she is The Man. She may be one of your lovers, but she is part of the Establishment, the establishment that says that certain characteristics of your mind are Bad.

You’d ordinarily agree with them. You hear some fucked up shit sometimes. You hear shit that keeps you up at night, telling you to do things you’d never do if you were in your right mind. And you don’t mind being medicated back into your right mind when you’re not in it. You don’t want to hurt anyone. You don’t (usually) want to hurt yourself.

Still.

You can’t remember a time where you did not hear things that other people failed to hear. You’re beginning to think that, like your clumsiness, this is some fundamental part of your neurochemistry. Maybe Sollux was right and you got dropped on your head during some critical period of your development. You don’t know. He doesn’t either. He’s the younger one by five years.

When you were a kid, you thought everyone heard them the way you do. You thought it was normal.

When you were a little older, you thought they were there to keep you from getting lonely or bored when you were by yourself. You were raised in a house with not just your parents and brother, but half your extended family as well. Anything less than total chaos threw you off totally off balance.

When you were a year or two older than that, doctors started medicating you for them.

But the only time you heard absolutely nothing in your head - nothing but your own syrup-slow cognition - was during your last spectacular breakdown in 2007, where the doctors at King’s County pumped you full of Haldol and Ativan to the point where you wished Latula a happy birthday in the middle of July. You weren’t too high to notice the downturn of your mouth, the way she shook her head as she thanked you.

When Calliope gets home from school, she asks you if your friends are still visiting. That’s how she puts it when your hallucinations aren’t negative in their vocalizations. Visiting friends. That’s how you started thinking of them immediately after she said it.

“Yeah. You thaid good afternoon to me while I wath at work,” you reply. “While I wath on break, having a thmoke.”

“Did I, now?” she asks. “Well, let me take the time to say it again!”

And she does, with an embrace. You pat her on the head, not patronizing, but affectionate. She jokes around that you have a cat for that sort of thing. You point out that Enderman is sitting on top of the bookcase, several feet above your head, and you are no gymnast.    

Figures that Callie would be the one to put a name to what you hear. She hears things too, but different in their… what’s that word Pomary has for it? _Etiology?_ One of those jargon type phrases.

For Calliope isn’t psychotic, at least, not like you. She just has flashbacks and hears Caliborn, and you can always tell when she does, because her pupils dilate completely and she tends to drop whatever she’s holding. She relives the past, for all its horror, in all its horror.

You merely hear. 

Past conversations with Latula. Old discussions with Porrim. Poker matches with Damara. The scratch of Kurloz’s writing on his legal pad. Echoes you can’t identify. And your mother, always in Cantonese, telling you how much she misses you. Also Sollux. Sollux demanding to know why you thought he’d abandon you over certain inclinations of yours.

(“Do you, whatever maketh you happy,” he said. “Just remember you still owe me two hundred buckth from last year.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll pay you when I can.”

“And no hitting up Porrim for money. I’ll athk her, you know.”

“Not like she’d lend it to me. We’re both broke.”)

And more than any ingrained familial obligations, those moments when you’ve heard your family - even your extended family - are the times when you’ve decided to pick up the phone.

“I heard you, Mama,” you told her in Canto.

“And I, you,” she replied.

She used to hear things too, but outgrew that in her twenties, for the most part. You know she’s hoping the same thing for you. Who knows? Maybe things will go silent, but you’re not sure - even now - if that’s a good thing.

You asked her if Sollux was around, asked her to put him on the phone. You heard him grumble in the background.

He put the receiver to his ear. “What.”

“How’th thenior year?” you asked him, in English.

“Difficult. College appthth and shit. ” He sighed, sounding exhausted. “If you tell me you heard me, I’ll kick you.”

“Gonna be real hard for you to kick me from Eatht New York.”

“They need to up your medth, Tuna.”

“They’re up ath high ath I want them to go.”

Get any higher and you risk careening into greyscale. No voices, but no anything. Pure, rolling numbness.

You’ve been on this merry-go-round enough times to know that your hallucinations intensify during times of stress. You’re looking at your third to last set of finals for your undergraduate career. You’re supposed to be stressed out. This is the outlet. If they overmedicate you now, you’ll fail your tests.

As long as the voices don’t tip into cacophony, and stop you from studying, you can deal with them.

Occasionally, a dark voice calls you things you prefer not to contemplate. Inadequate is one. Hopeless is another. There’re more, but they can’t keep their pull on you the way they used to. You know they’re not real.

You know the good voices aren’t real, but at least they’re encouraging.

Porrim - Porrim the hallucination, sounding well-rested in way she hasn’t sounded since 9th grade - suggests that you eat something, and take a break from studying, and if that isn’t the most ironic thing in the world, you don’t know what is.

You put on a cup of instant ramen, and slurp it down with one hand while your other holds a lit cigarette. You tap it out into the miniature dessert dish turned ashtray. Calliope sits next to you on the kitchen floor, on her little laptop, filling out her college applications.

“Ms. Martineau says that Vassar’s a reach for me, but I should try for it anyway,” Calliope says to you, expecting some sort of answer. You are the only college student in the apartment, after all.

You grin. “Go for it. What’re your thafety thchoolth?”

She rattles off an array of CUNY and SUNY colleges.

If she ends up at your school, you’ll laugh your ass off, mostly since you’re not due to graduate until Fall 2011. You and she can attend college together for a semester. You’ll personally destroy anyone who tries to fuck with her.

“Thoundth good to me.”

You twirl your pen absentmindedly, dreading a jade-green-eyed woman in greener scrubs, with a thousand yard stare.

Maybe you’ll bullshit her when she gets home, and insist to her that you hear nothing anymore. Maybe she’ll be tired enough to believe you, to want to believe you.

But that’s not how it happens.

Even the best laid plans go awry, and you, Mituna, are shit at planning anything.

Once she finds out you’ve been telling her horseshit, Porrim pounds the flat of her hand against the wall with such intensity that you flinch, and Calliope ducks, dashing off to some unseen place.

Then, Porrim apologizes.

You stare at your shoes. “I shouldn’t have lied.”

“I shouldn’t have gotten angry,” she starts in, and for a moment, you think everything will smooth over like glass until it shatters like glass.

“…but, Mituna, you’re not living in reality.”

“I’m livin’ in my own reality, thame way as everyone elthe. You got your own reality, Callie’th got her own reality, Kurloth hath hith own reality. Is one better than another?”

Porrim nods.

“Hallucinations are a symptom of psychosis, a serious symptom. And you have schizoaffect—”

You grab her shoulders to get her to stop speaking, resisting the urge to shake her.

“Is it tho hard for you to jutht treat me like a perthon anymore?”

She blinks.

“What?”

“You thee me now, now that you’re almotht done with thchool, and you think DSM codeth. Two-ninety-five dot theventy, thchithoaffective dithorder,” you reply, bitter. “When you thaw me before, you thought, oh, that’th Mituna. That’th my betht friend.”

A distressed furrow forms between Porrim’s eyebrows. Her face drops, chin quivering.

You tilt it back up.

“Couldn’t I be doing both?” she asks. “To acknowledge you fully is to acknowledge your disorder, the same you do to mine.”

“But it’th not to reduthe all my pertheption to a therieth of numberth, regardlethth of what I thay! That’s not acknowledgement. That’th dehumanithation!”

Porrim recoils as if you’ve slapped her in the face.

“I have never, ever meant to dehumanize you,” she says. She swallows. “I am so, so sorry. You don’t have to believe me but–”

“I do.”

“And the system–”

..fucking thuckth, they medicate you until you can’t thtring together a thententhe.” you supply. “It’s utter shit ‘lethth you got depression or anxiety, and only then if you rethpond to medth.”

She concedes that point, the last of her lipstick migrating to her two front teeth as she bites down on her lower lip.

You remind her of the reason she even went into nursing, instead of studio art or fashion design.

“I wanted to change the system,” she murmurs. “I _want_ to change the system.”

“Tho thtart here,” you suggest. “I’m fine. What I hear cautheth me no immediate dithtrethth. I am neither a danger to mythelf or anyone elthe. You can athk Calliope.”

“Calliope?” Porrim asks.

You point to the quiet room - technically the closet where you, Porrim, and Kurloz keep your clothes - the place where Callie always retreats when she senses an argument about to begin.

“But you don’t know that for certain!” Porrim insists, her jaw set in determination. “You can’t know that! You could be fine now, in your little chamber of benign hallucinations, and then two days from now, you’ll be telling me that you’re gonna drown in the fucking shower! You’ll be breaking shit, and screaming, and…”

But it doesn’t happen just like that. It takes weeks for you to cycle into such a state. It takes time for you to fully lose touch with reality, and she knows that. You are the less volatile of the Captor siblings. Hell, you even know the signs of a bad episode. And you’ve been stuck in this mindset, with these voices, for at least six weeks and nothing has changed for the worst. You can understand where she’s coming from, but disagree with her analysis.

“Or I could tell my thychiatritht everything, and end up tho drugged that I have to repeat a whole themethter of courthework. All my final eckhamth. And I’m already a term behind.”

Porrim says nothing for a while. Just stares at you, completely. Like she can see through you.

She goes into the kitchen to put on a pot of either tea or coffee. After a moment, you follow her.

She’s not making coffee for one of the chipped cups in your cabinet, no this for her travel mug. She’s planning to leave, whether to Meenah’s, or Latula’s, or the library you don’t know. And you don’t want her to leave now. Not over this.

You stoop down a bit to rest your head in the juncture where her neck and shoulder meet, and hug her from behind.

“I didn’t mean to thtart an argument with you.”

It’s true. You didn’t. You didn’t mean to scare Calliope. You didn’t mean to upset Porrim. She turns in your arms, her ear against your mouth.

“It was bound to happen, Mituna,” she says. “We’re at an impasse.”

“Really?”

“I won’t change your mind, and you can’t change mine,” she says, pouring the boiling water into the filter full of coffee. “Or you can, and that’s the part that scares me.”

“How tho?”

Getting her to see this from your point of view, that would be the ideal. You even promise to tell her if things get worse. You even swear you’ll tell your psychiatrist about the good voices after finals. If she’ll stay, you’ll do it. You never make promises you don’t plan to keep.

“There may come a patient, just as articulate as you, just as compelling as you, and if I choose not to administer treatment, or to administer a lesser treatment, when a doctor has ordered a specific one, I could get brought up on charges. If I choose not to disclose information I know to a doctor, I could get in trouble.”

“Well, you could alwayth jutht argue with the doctor about it.”

“What kind of self-respecting doctor is going to listen to a nurse fresh out of school?”

“What happened to changing the thythtem?” you want to know.

“Gradual changes, Mituna. If I get fired, I wind up doing nothing. Nothing.”

She picks up her double-breasted jacket off the couch, puts it on over her scrubs, and clips her keys onto the lanyard around her neck. She adjusts her scarf.

You weren’t sad before, but you are now. Look at your (girl)friend, look at her go.

“You know how fucking eager Dr. Rothen is to overmedicate me,” you nearly shout at her. “But I guess you gotta defer to his judgment ‘cauthe he’th my fucking doctor. Do you even remember 2009?”

2009\. The year you were once again medicated into no longer knowing what day it was. 2009. The year Porrim spent a week in the psych ward for her eating disorder, where the attending proceeded to also overmedicate her into unfathomable speechlessness because the staff wouldn’t let Kanaya visit, and Porrim had a conniption.

It’s a low blow, but it stops her in her tracks.

“Were they right becauthe they were doctorth? Are they fuckin godth onthe they get their white coatth? Fuck, should I get on my kneeth and thay ‘Hail Rothen, full of grathe’ when I thee him in a week?”

“You are exaggerating, Mituna,” she tells you. A tear rolls down her cheek.

You shouldn’t have gone there. You should not have gone within a half mile of that.

Insane. Inadequate. Selfish. Hopeless. Mituna, you cannot do anything right.

“And you're crying. I’m sorry.” You scoop her up. She’s tall but she’s light. “I’m so sorry.”

You repeat the word sorry until it stops having any meaning. Porrim swipes at her face with her sleeve.

“I heard you, earlier,” you murmur into her hair. “You told me to thtop thtudying tho much.”

“Are you quite certain it was me, then?” she asks.

“Uh, yeah man. You lectured me and shit, and the voithe wathn’t deep enough to be Kankri’th. Not annoying enough, either.”

She rolls her eyes. “You wound me, Mituna.”

But she’s smiling, just a little.

She lets you untie her scarf and undo her jacket, even lets you unbutton it, awkward as you are with buttons. You tell her about hearing your mother, hearing Sollux, hearing Calliope, hearing Latula, hearing her. Hearing friends you haven’t seen in ages. How the apartment - when you’re alone in it - can come to life. You don’t have to study in absolute silence.

You tell her that you’ve been hearing things for so long that it’s the silence that scares you most. Who or what would you be without these voices? Would you be anything?

Sometimes the hallucinations issue like garbled radio static, like you’re driving on the interstate, too far away from either station on a certain frequency to catch a word either side is saying. Just like they are now.

Nothing harmful. Nothing bad. No delusions.

“I suppose I see your point,” she says, gritting her teeth. “Partially.”

It’s not smooth as glass, this reconciliation. You’ll have a similar argument another day. If you do fall into a true psychotic episode, she’ll see that you get through it, but the look in her eyes will be unbearable.

_I could have done something, and I did not._

Maybe you will tell Dr. Rosen. You don’t know. No. You promised you will. For better or worse.

But for now, it’s just Porrim here, barely wearing her black coat. You pull her up by the lapels and kiss her on the mouth. She sags into you, her fingers fiddling with the ties on your sweatshirt. You let one of your hands fall to the small of her back to support her.

“You think too damn much,” you say to her.

“And you, not enough.”

“You got no idea how much I think,” you reply. “My head’th never quiet.”

She divests you of your sweatshirt and shakes her head. In another fluid motion, she’s wearing nothing but her sports bra and her scrub pants.

“I could believe that last part, at least.”

Although you could - and judging from the look on Porrim’s face, both of you are of the same mind - you don’t have sex tonight. Calliope is home, after all.

Porrim taps on the closet door with one knuckle until Calliope comes out, blinking as her eyes adjust to the light.

“Are you two…?”

“We have resolved the argument for the moment,” Porrim says to her.

“Oh. Okay. That’s nice.”

Callie retires to her air mattress, working toward all green triangles on her common app. Occasionally she’ll ask Porrim if a sentence sounds good to her. For her part, Porrim dumps out her coffee, makes a cup of tea, and takes her mirtazapine.

You swallow down your handful of evening meds, a gray wave pulling you down an hour later.

But you don’t sleep easy.

You worry about Porrim worrying about you.

Is there a word for that? Meta-worrying? You’ll make it one.

You roll over, expecting to see her either staring at the ceiling or sleeping, but she’s not on the futon.

Oh no. 

She left. She went away. You made her leave. 

You shouldn’t have said what you said. 

Not that you own her - Porrim owns herself, from her box braids down to her carefully lacquered toenails - but you never meant to hurt her.

If she’s gone, you’ll give her time before you apologize. You guess you’ll text Latula or Meenah to see if she’s there.

Then, you follow the faint smell of cigarette smoke out to the fire escape. Porrim sits on the grating, leaning forward, resting her forehead against her hand to keep the hair from her eyes, as she pages through dense tome number 700 of her college career. 

Her nightgown billows around her in the wind, her cigarette a solitary luminary pinprick between her index and middle fingers. You have no idea how she manages it without setting her nightgown aflame.

She gazes up at the sky, smiles, and turns away. She does not notice you. You exhale against the windowpane, and draw a little heart in the condensation. You go back to bed.

* * *

translation:

_Then, before my eyes,_   
_all their embraces were consumed_   
_in a perfumed cloud of vapor._

_I saw them fly quickly away, that way._   
_I saw them go away_   
_without a word,_   
_without a gesture._

_And I loved them._


End file.
